My Breakup with Coffee

I am a recovering hard-core caffiene addict. At fourteen.

Stop laughing.

In all honesty, it got the point where I was drinking 4-5 cups of coffee a day. It made sense at the time. At least, I thought it did.

I picked up my first real cup of coffee, a Starbucks Double Shot Light, I believe it was, and never looked back. I was hooked.

This is not to say I was drinking 5+ cups of coffee day at age 8, but that’s when I was condemned to a caffeine-aholic future. My fate was sealed forever. Being over-dramatic is also a side effect of coffee.

Except that one doesn’t go away. I’m a fantastic example of this.

Starting in fifth grade or so, I would bring a can of that Starbucks Double SHot Light to school in my sack lunch. This was considered a great act of defiance.

And because it was a slow news week in the fifth grade grape-vine, that creepy girl Kelly and her can of mysterious can of coffee became the subject of gossip and the ten year old’s equivalent of controversy.

Luckily for me, Kim Kardashian’s show soon became popular, and so I was relieved of the lime light. For now.

A year or two later, the coffee cans began to reemerge in my sack lunch, and now that kids were older and had more colorful vocabularies, I did not take the talk about me as well.

Random people I barely talked to would come up to me and tell me I was going to die. That caffeine was going to kill me. Coffee was going to stunt my growth and would inevitably be a dwarf. Coffee would drain all happiness from my life. Coffee would make me a giant three-headed monster who eats all her friends.

Oddly enough, none of those things happened. Weird.

Anyway, the fact that my classmates were utterly wrong (other than the fact that I am only 5’4″) was only encouragement to keep drinking coffee. Originally, I only drank it because it tasted good.

As time progressed, I drank it for other reasons. In the seventh grade, I was perpetually exhausted. looking  back on it, was under a lot of pressure and was obviously doing too much. However, i did not know this at the time and insisted on self-medicating with caffeine.

I started slowly, a cup or two tops of coffee a day. I began to grow quite fond of the jitteriness that it left me, and how it relieved me of my interminable exhaustion. Eventually, I needed more coffee to sustain this.

So I simply consumed more coffee. Three cups a day, four cups, five… I craved it. I needed it. I could not do without it.

But life happened. I would sleep in late. I would misplace my thermos. I would miss my morning coffee.

I thought I would be fine because it was just one day, but this was not the case. I was hysterical. I went to my music rehearsal, and, in the middle of Mozart’s Alleluia, I began to cry. Very loudly. For no particular reason.

I claimed I was in a  state of caffiene-deprived irrationality, and continued on with the rehearsal. When I returned home that evening, I made myself a peanut butter and banana sandwich. I burned the sandwich and, once again, began to cry inconsolably.

But it’s just so sad! That banana never did anything to me.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I was letting a cup of coffee rule my life, and I would not put up with it anymore.

Besides insanity, I was experiencing a bunch of other random side effects that I was looking over until then. They couldn’t be the coffee’s fault…

Yeah right. Unexplained chronic stomach pain, headaches, low energy levels, and going to the bathroom a lot are totally coincidences. Totally.

So I stopped. I stopped drinking coffee entirely.

And it was hard. I was just so dependent on it for so many different things. The first few days were brutal, especially for the people around me, but they gave me support. I have the greatest family and friends.

I started drinking tea about a week later, so my body could slowly adapt to small quantities of caffeine. I do drink a lot of tea now, but think I feel much better overall.

So today, a few months after my breakup with coffee, I had this dire need to drink an iced coffee, which I usually hate. After raiding the nearest Starbucks, I slurped my entire drink down.

Sure it tasted good, but I absolutely despised the way it made feel. I felt so artificially hyper, and I couldn’t think straight.

I pledged my undying loyalty to my beloved tea, and said my final goodbye to coffee.

Bye. Have fun in the garbage can.

Enjoy!

-Kelly M.

Do you drink coffee? Have you had issues with it? What about tea? I would absolutely love to hear about your experiences! Please let me know! Thanks!